Discourse Analysis

Hello and welcome to another entry into my research methods blog. For this entry Clare has given each of the students in the class an assigned topic to research and answer questions on. The topic I was assigned to research is “Discourse Analysis” and here are my answers below.

What is it?

Answer:

First to answers this question I will give a brief definition of what “discourse” by itself means; discourse can be defined as being a conversation, discussion, talk, speech or anything that is a written or spoken communication.

So coming back to the question, discourse analysis is used to analysis these written or spoken communications through the use of different approaches of discourse analysis.

What kinds of questions/problems might it be useful for?

Answer:

Discourse analysis can be used for example by a linguist to answer such questions as; how does a person use paragraphs or strings of words as a whole to make up a written conversation.

Or another example could be how does one person use spoken language to communicate to another person over an entire conversation.

How could it be used in IT research (try to think of an example)?

Answer:

I find it hard to think of an example for the use of discourse analysis in IT research; the only example I could think of, is to use it to examine how someone such as a leader or boss in the IT field uses words or writing to communicate to their employees.

What are the strengths of the approach?

• Pulls apart and analyses entire written or spoken conversations to see how the words and paragraphs used make up the conversation.

What are the weaknesses of the approach?

• I’m not too sure of the overall weakness of this approach. The one thing I can think of is that it’s based around quantitative research so it’s something that can’t be measured in overall scientific way.

Summary

Overall this i found this another hard concept to grasp much like epistemology and ontology, but in the end i think i gained some understanding on what the overall concept is and how it is applied.